It is an honor to be included in this distinguished lecture
series, which over a span of 16 years (at the original instigation of
Professor John Steiner) has played a vital role in informing and
focusing the conscience of a great many students, faculty, and
citizens on issues most people would rather not think about. It is
not pleasant to think about the nature of evil, of collective
violence, of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, brutal tortures,
and bestial acts of man against man that challenge our basic
conception of human nature.

As an aside, I use the politically incorrect phrase "man against man"
in this case because most of the evil that the world has experienced
has been perpetrated by men. In wars it is young men exploited by old
political leaders to kill other young men under the banner of one
ideology or another in their quest to conquer the resources or
another nation. And in rape it is men who violate the integrity of
women, and also under some conditions they violate other men. But we
shall not move women totally off center stage in our analysis of
evil, since they often participate insidiously by supporting their
husbands, sons, and brothers with patriotic fervor as they are
marched off to wars, by working in factories making weapons of
destruction, and always by standing silent witnesses to atrocities of
their men folk, or choosing to remain ignorant of them by not
demanding to know more so that they could condemn the massacres and
atrocities that have occurred in their lands and by their men on
foreign shores.

It would be hubris on my part to believe that I could add
significant insights to the themes of this lecture series beyond
those that learned scholars from many disciplines have already
advanced, as well as the perceptive analysis of survivors. However,
what I will attempt to do is to more modestly outline some of the
psychological processes that I believe are involved in the kind of
evil we are concerned with here, consider some social psychological
strategies and tactics that may facilitate the transformation of good
people into evil monsters, and mention variables, constructs and
processes at a more macro level, sociological and political, that
must be included when we move from individual to collective violence,
and to the unique phenomenon of genocide, the desire to destroy an
entire nation or race of people by those who consider themselves a
superior nation or race.

As in my previous lectures here, I will add visual materials to my
presentation in order to vivify and clarify parts of my message, but
many of them are newly integrated into this lecture.

The structure of my talk then is as
follows:

* It begins with a brief reflection on the origins of the
transformation of good into evil, and notes our collective
fascination with that process whereby an ordinary person behaves in
totally unpredictable ways, as in the Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde story, or
cases of multiple personality disorders.

* I argue against the theory that Evil resides in the genes,
biology, or temperament of particular people -- the sadists,
deranged, psychopaths, and their ilk. Instead I will propose that
most evil is the product of rather ordinary people caught up in
unusual circumstances that they are not equipped to cope with in the
normal ways that have worked in the past to escape, avoid or
challenge them, while they are being recruited, seduced, initiated
into evil by persuasive authorities or compelling peer pressure.

* Then I will present a few social psychological studies of my
colleagues and mine that demonstrate it is possible to induce "Every
man and Every woman" to do deeds that are alien to their
personalities and to their previous history of morality.

* In doing so, I will use the metaphor of the imaginary Line
between Good and Evil that separates the "GOOD US"' from the "EVIL
THEM" -- my analytical goal is to determine what it would take for
any one of you Good Folks to cross that line.

* Next we expand our analysis beyond psychology to incorporate
concepts that must be part of our analysis in an understanding of
collective violence as national levels, to prepare men to kill in
wars of genocide.

* Unfortunately, I will not have the time here and now to add an
analysis of some current research I am doing on understanding the
transformations by which soldiers and policemen become Torturers --
torture being one of the most demeaning acts of human violence, and
in some ways worse than murder since it involves personal contact,
intimate knowledge of another person's vulnerabilities, and the
intentional desire to violate that vulnerability with the aims of
getting confessions, information, and/or of eliciting humiliation in
the victim and generating terror in his or her family, friends, and
compatriots. Perhaps we can touch on this area in our question period
after the formal presentation.

Slide 1-- Escher illusion of Angels
and Devils

As we look at this figure-ground illusion by the artist Escher,
focusing on the white figures with black as ground, we see a world of
Angels. But reverse the figure-ground relationship and the Angels
become Devils, black demons rising above the good white background.
This perceptual transformation reminds us of the similar
transformation in the biblical story of God's favorite angel, Lucifer
"the light of God's eyes" who led a revolt against his master. When
put down by the forces of good, led by The Archangel Michael, Lucifer
and his revolutionary band are cast out of Heaven into the newly
created domain of Hell. This tale centers on the twin sins of Pride,
the ambition to overextend one's sense of personal worth to feel
superior to others, and disobedience to authority, which challenges
the status quo. I will argue however, that obedience to authority
must be limited to authority that is just, honest, and fair, when it
is not, then disobedience should be the call to arms against tyrants
and tyranny. This illusion also reminds me of the statement by
psychologist Roy Baumeister, "Evil exists primarily in the eye of the
beholder, especially in the eye of the victim" (1996, p. 1), since
Perpetrators never see their acts as evil deeds.

So from early Christian history, we have an exemplar of the
possibility of the Best becoming transformed into the Worst, of
Angels to Devils. And of course, then Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, or
whatever we call it, become the embodiment of evil, the source of
temptation for all humans to do bad deeds, forsake heaven, and be
destined to end up in hell. The humanization of the Devil has been
carried over to the characterization of evil as being an attribute of
some people as inherently evil. The dispositional analysis of evil
has focused analytical attention on identifying those individuals who
are evil by nature, and indeed there are some people who have
directed collective violence, such as Hitler and Stalin. This
analysis then continues with remedial actions of changing these evil
people by reeducating them, giving them therapy, isolating them,
imprisoning them, or executing them. And we have been doing all those
treatments for centuries, with null effects on the extent of evil in
our world as can be seen in the next slide.

Slide 2: Listing of world wide
misery of Holocausts and Massacres

The horrors spawned by the evil of Hitler against Jews and other
"undesirables," have been matched or exceeded by Stalin's purges and
by Mao in his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and
followed up in many countries, by Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and others who
are nameless killers. The horrors statistically detailed in this
table do not include the genocide of the American Indians by European
settlers and the U.S. military, nor the horrors committed by the
Japanese in China, and daily atrocities being committed as we speak
in Kosovo, Rwanda, and other murderous venues. But those Evil men are
dead, yet evil continues, those evil men probably did not kill a
single individual personally, they gave directions, orders, to others
who did. It is more profitable I believe for us to focus our
analytical energies on understanding why those followers killed for
their leaders, or why once they started he killing, their leaders
became irrelevant, once the machinery of mass murder had been
installed and lubricated, it required only persistent dedication to
one's job and the knowledge that it is being executed effectively. We
don't need Evil demons for those deeds, only compliant workers or
willing soldiers.

This table recounts some of the collective violence in this
century, but let us not think it is a modern invention, as we see in
Homer's historical account of the Battle of Troy.

Overhead 1: Homer's recounting of Agamemnon's orders to his
Trojan forces to destroy every bit of the enemy's existence.

Overhead 2: "Hannah Arendt" Banality of Evil in her analysis
of Eichmann during the Nuremberg Trials, from Psychology and Life,
[15 ed. by Zimbardo and Gerrig

But who are these Evil murderers? We get one perceptive glimpse of
them from a profound analysis of Adolf Eichmann. Allow me to read
some of the text of the classic statement by Hannah Arendt that some
students might not know about. (The point of this statement is the
utter normality of this man, the banality of his evil, who was
responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews).

Her analysis had a powerful impact on my thinking, motivating my
search for the conditions under which any of us "normal," "ordinary"
men and women, might do as Eichmann did, to cross that line from Good
to Evil, to go from being a good family man, a dutiful citizen to a
mass murder with no conscience for his evil deeds and no remorse for
destroying human lives.

Overhead 3- Cartoon of Dr Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde and slight line between them.

What is that Line, that Cosmic Boundary, and how is it maintained?
If you are like me, you are captivated by Robert Louis Stevenson's
tale of the good Dr. Jekyll who drinks his chemical invention that
instantly transforms him into a brutal monster who kills with
pleasure. But are there other ways for people to cross that line?
What would it take for You to slide across it? It is so comforting to
be on the Good side, to side with the Angels as it were, that we are
lulled into a false sense of security about our vulnerability to
being seduced across that state of consciousness line. We want to
believe it is impermeable, with US here forever and THEM over there
permanently, when its membrane is rather permeable, as I shall try to
show next.

The notion that there are Good and Bad people is part of a
Dispositional analysis advanced by many theorists to explain the
determinants of behavior in terms of traits and other inner personal
characteristics. An alternative analysis explains human actions in
terms of Situational determinants, aspects of the behavioral context
that channel action in particular directions. Although most human
action is an interaction of person and situational variables, it is
common for us to make the Fundamental Attribution Error plain by
overemphasizing the Dispositional while simultaneously underplaying
the Situational.

Today, my emphasis will try to counteract that human tendency by
playing up the Power of the Situation. However, I will agree with the
novel thesis presented here last week by Professor Steiner that the
roles individuals play have margins of discretion within which they
can exercise freedom of choice in how they carry out the functions of
those roles. Those margins are expanded when people have a high
degree of moral and social intelligence, but I add, that those
margins are compressed when situations become "total" and
powerful.

Slide 3: Firing squad

(Describe situation where a traitor is sentenced to death by
firing squad but government want to recruit his peers, civilians to
shoot him. I try to encourage audience members to volunteer. Likely
few will.)

Slide 4: Gun barrel

{I add a conditional, only one real bullet in the chamber of one
of 6 guns, thus only 1 chance in 48 that when you press trigger, you
gun will be the lethal weapon, only 2 % likelihood, now will you join
the firing squad that is of course totally legal? Typically more
agree. Why?

Adding the tactic of Diffusion of Responsibility greased that line
and some good people were ready to become killers for the state. And
how did they really know that not all the bullets were live
ammunition, which just to be sure the traitor was blasted away, we
agents of evil would have loaded into each gun?

So we have discovered one social psychological principle which
changes the width of that Line, are there others that would narrow
the boundary, grease the line, nudge some of you across to the other
side?

Indeed there are many situational variables that subtly change key
elements of the behavioral space and shift the behavioral dynamics
away from standard operating procedures toward novel relationships
and contingencies for which the Actor does not have a prepared script
to guide behavior down familiar paths-- and so becomes more
vulnerable to the demands of the immediately present behavioral
context. Let's see what this means in three experiments, the first on
blind obedience to authority, the second on anonymity and aggression
in groups, and the third on induced dehumanization.

Obedience to Authority:

Stanley Milgram's Jewish heritage contributed to his intellectual
and personal concern for finding an answer to the question: "If
Hitler asked you, would YOU execute a stranger?" Would ordinary
people, American citizens, from every walk of life behave as the
Nazis did in harming innocent victims? Despite cultural differences,
historical setting differences, and the absence of the charismatic
power of Adolf Hitler, could it be demonstrated that thousands of US
could be led down the same path as THEM, to inflict extreme harm on
another human being?

How could an experimental research paradigm provide answers to
such vital questions?

Slide 5: Milgram's newspaper ad for volunteer subjects

In this newspaper ad Milgram set the background for his drama. He
invited a host of different kinds of citizens from New Haven, CT, to
volunteer for pay as subjects in scientific research on memory. He
wants white and blue collar workers, men and women, but no students.
Why? Because he had already demonstrated what students would do in
the situation that I will describe to you, and he wanted to see if
their effect was general or unique to intelligent college students
from Yale University. I should add that after he tested these 500
citizens, Milgram moved his show on the road and replicated the
results in another town, Bridgeport CT, with 500 more citizens, using
a small store front as his laboratory. He did so in order to show
that the effects found were not constrained by the prestige and
association with Yale University. They were not.

Very briefly, let's run through the procedure and then after
examining the basic results, I want to summarize the set of variables
and processes in this research that have direct application to our
understanding of how ordinary citizens can be transformed in
Perpetrators of Evil.

[Slides of Sequence of Experiment or video segment]

Pairs of participants would arrive at the lab at a specified time
and be told that they were helping psychological science to find new
ways to improve memory and thereby help in the education process.
Although research has shown that reinforcement for correct responses
aids learning, it remains to be seen whether judicious use of
punishment for errors also enhances learning and memory and that is
what today's study is about.

One volunteer will play the role of Teacher, the other will be the
Student-Learner, allegedly randomly chosen by their selection of a
long or short straw. The Learner will try to memorize a list of word
associates and the Teacher will administer the testing, indicating
correct responding and also immediately indicating errors by means of
special technology, by pressing buttons on an apparatus that will
deliver a precise amount of electric stimulation to the Learner to
help him stop making errors.

The first button will deliver a small amount of current, only 15
volts, and each successive button adds a small increment of only 15
volts, but there are 30 such buttons to use in the rare case where
the Learner needs a full set of such stimulation to learn his or her
lesson well. The maximum voltage the machine can deliver is 450
volts, which is clearly labeled, "Danger, High Voltage, XXX." But of
course, it is unlikely any such extremes would be necessary.

Straws are drawn, the lovable, middle-aged, Irish-looking man is
the Learner, YOU are the Teacher. Both parties agree to the terms and
rules of the study, and the show goes on the road.

Teacher helps the Experimenter, who is wearing the white lab coat,
symbolic of his status, to connect the Learner to the shock
apparatus, which is an adjacent room. On the first trials, learning
is going well, the word associates are being recalled, Teacher says,
"Good, Fine."

But then the Learner starts making errors and the punishment
begins, first small, then ever escalating. As is does, the Learner
begins complaining, then yelling and screaming. The Teacher is upset,
never imagined it would come to this. Turning to the Experimenter,
the Teacher dissents, indicating he or she does not want to continue,
which is cast aside as the Teacher is reminded of the contract agreed
to previously. More shock, more yelling, complaining of a heart
condition, insisting he wants to quit. "Who will be responsible if
something bad happens in there to the Learner, Sir?" asks the
Teacher. "I will, please continue, Teacher." At 375 volts the Learner
screams, there is a loud thud, and then only silence from the shock
chamber thereafter.

Teacher is now really distressed (the women often cry, the men
wince), says the experiment should be terminated because the Learner
has stopped responding.

Not so easy. "Remember the rules," reminds the Experimenter,
"Failure to respond is an error and all errors must be punished
immediately with the appropriate level of reaction, Teacher." And
there are 5 more higher levels possible to go all the way up to the
extreme of 450 volts.

Will YOU go all the way? Would any of the Teachers in this
research, any of the more than 1000 of them go all the way, and
thereby perhaps become an accomplice in killing this innocent
stranger? Hard to imagine that extreme outcome ever happening, isn't
it? Before starting his research, Milgram invited 40 psychiatrists to
predict the percentage and type of person who would indeed go all the
way in this study that he described to them in detail. In their
collective wisdom fewer than 1% of the Teacher-Subjects would go all
the way, and they would be the sadists among us. Such an evil deed
would only be committed by pathological persons, not by anyone who is
normal, they asserted. So their estimate, say 1%, is the predicted
base rate against which we are to evaluate the actual extent of blind
obedience to the authority.

To get a better flavor of what the experiment actually looked like
and the historical context in which it was done, I have prepared a
brief video segment for you to experience.

(Video segment of Milgram Experiment from Discovering
Psychology)

[Slide 6: Basic data slide from first Milgram study]

So the psychiatrists were all wrong, your estimates were all
wrong, everyone's predictions were all wrong. Not 1 percent
compliance, 65 % compliance, two-thirds of the subjects went all the
way up to the final level. As you can see, no one even quit before
275 volts when there was a lot of screaming going on. And then some
drop out at each higher level, but if they do not quit when the
Learner becomes unconscious at 375 volts, then all the remaining
Teachers dutifully obey the Experimenter and blindly and mindlessly
press button after button until they hit the final level of Severe
Danger High Voltage, and then they can finally be allowed to leave
this distressing situation, since they have completed their contract
and can receive their $4.00 payment.

[Slide 7: Graph of 19 studies in which rate of compliance
varies systematically as a function of manipulating different
situational variables]

This two-thirds of subjects who blindly obeyed authority is a
benchmark statistic, but it can be nearly eliminated down to 10% or
greatly increased up to 90% not by adding or subtracting sadists or
altruists to the subject pool but by simply varying some aspect of
the situation as can be seen in this graph that I have prepared that
summarizes the data from 19 different studies Milgram conducted..
Want to increase the effect? Have peers model the destructive
behavior. Want to eliminate it? Have the victim, the Learner, demand
to be shocked. Then the Teachers don't shock, they are not sadists,
and that is "sick" if someone wants to be shocked. In sum, the
results of Milgram's research is the most generalizable in all of
social science, since it includes dozens of systematic replications
with a 1000 subjects from as diverse backgrounds as possible within
the United States.

So what is the answer, that my friend and New York High School
class mate, Stanley Milgram, made about his initial question? Yes,
sadly, ordinary people could be seduced, initiated into behaving in
ways that might lead to killing innocent victims. Almost any of us,
at least the majority of us, could change places with Eichmann, if we
fell under the power of the same situational forces as he faced. I
should also mention that these results have been replicated by
independent investigators in the United States and Europe.

Where were the Heroes?

But I am sure that you are wondering about the 1/3 who were heroic
in resisting the power of these situational forces. Indeed in my
analysis that is the definition of HEROIC, those individuals who are
somehow able to resist the pressures that most of us give into, are
vulnerable to. But even they obeyed an authority higher than Milgram
after they disobeyed him. What did they do after quitting the
experiment when the Learner appeared to have had a heart attack in
the other room? Get up from their seat to help him? Demand that the
Experimenter help him? What? I asked Milgram that question, he
checked his records and memory and answered simply, NOT ONE, NOT
EVER, did those heroic subjects leave their seat to help their victim
without first being given permission to do so by the Experimenter.
The were still unconsciously obeying their elementary school
teacher's dictates that students must remain in their seats until
they are told they can get up. Obedience runs deep and insidious in
our learned behavioral patterns.

[Overhead # : Summary of Conditions involved in this
transformation]

So what have we learned from this experimental research, in this
highly artificial setting, that might have direct relevance to our
basic issue of HOW to transform people into perpetrators of evil? Let
me outline the lessons I think we should take to heart as helping us
to understand some fundamental processes in making that line between
GOOD and Evil more permeable.

CONDITIONS FROM OBEDIENCE RESEARCH THAT
INFORM OUR ANALYSIS OF THE PERPETRATION OF EVIL

* START WITH AN IDEOLOGY (JUSTIFYING BELIEFS FOR ACTIONS)

* USE AUTHORITY TO LEGITIMATE THAT IDEOLOGY

* GIVE PEOPLE DESIRABLE ROLES TO PLAY WITH MEANINGFUL STATUS

* HAVE RULES THAT CHANNEL BEHAVIORAL OPTIONS

* EMPLOY SEMANTIC DISTORTION TO DISGUISE TRUTH (HELP = HURT)

* ARRANGE FOR CONTRACTUAL AGREEMENT WITH THE GAME RULES BEFORE THE
GAME BEGINS

* MAKE SITUATION GIVE PERMISSION TO ENGAGE IN USUALLY TABOO
ACTS

* MAKE INITIAL HARMFUL ACT MINIMAL, MINOR, TRIVIAL

* ENABLE SUBSEQUENT ACTS TO ESCALATE ONLY GRADUALLY, MINIMALLY,
BUT THEIR CUMULATIVE IMPACT CAN BE DEADLY

* DISPLACE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONSEQUENCES ON AUTHORITY OR
OTHERS

* GET ACTORS INVOLVED IN ACTION, IN TECHNOLOGY, IN DETAILS,
WITHOUT TIME TO THINK THROUGH THE MEANING OF THEIR ACTIONS

* DON'T ALLOW USUAL FORMS OF DISSENT TO WORK, UNDERCUT THEM SO
DISSENT DOES NOT LEAD TO DISOBEDIENCE

* PUT ACTORS IN NOVEL SETTING, WITHOUT FAMILIAR REFERENTS

* HAVE AUTHORITY TRANSFORM GRADUALLY FROM JUST TO UNJUST

* GIVE NO TRAINING IN HOW TO CHALLENGE UNJUST AUTHORITY

* DO NOT PROVIDE APPARENT MEANS FOR EXITING THE SITUATION

DEINDIVIDUATION

In one sense this obedience research is limited to situations
where a powerful authority is in direct control of the behavior of
subordinates. In much evil in the world there is no strong leader
always present insisting that you must go on to do evil, that would
be inefficient. Instead, the leader creates conditions that
facilitate evil in his absence.

What are those conditions?

* Take away people's sense of uniqueness and individuality since
that encourages spontaneity, rebelliousness and independence.

* Do so by submerging them in groups

* Put them in uniforms

* Disguise them

* Taken together, these actions will Deindividuate them

* Also, reduce their information-processing, cognitive

functioning capacities, by encouraging emotional, physical, high
intensity responding, and by altering their state of consciousness
through drugs, alcohol, and immersion in present-oriented
activities

Can we demonstrate experimentally that making people feel
anonymous will facilitate their crossing that LINE over to the EVIL
side?

The novelist William Golding suggested that it would happen to
good boys in his Nobel Prize-winning novel, Lord of the Flies, after
some painted themselves and were then able to kill pigs and other
boys with equal indifference.

To go from that imagined reality to behavioral reality, I did a
series of experiments on the concept of deindividuation, in which
college students' identities were concealed in a small group setting,
their names were replaced by numbers, their clothing covered with
baggy lab coats, and their faces covered by hoods, or masks. Their
task was to shock other subjects who were allegedly in a related
experiment on the effects of stress on creativity, they tried to be
creative while being stressed by these random shocks the members of
the observing group were administering to them. In the first study, I
stacked the cards against an easy outcome by having groups of woman
be the agents of pain for other women who were their victims. Later
studies used males and military personnel, with comparable
results.

[Slides 8-12 of De-Individuation research]

Simply put, anonymity facilitated aggressive behavior. College
women subjects in the deindividuated condition delivered twice as
much shock as did control women who were made to feel individuated
while all else was the same for both groups. Their shocking behavior
were variations in the duration level on each of 20 trials for each
of two victims. What is important in this study compared to Milgram's
is that during the shock phase, there was no authority present
demanding compliance with the rules. I was behind the one-way mirror
the subjects looked through seeing me testing the victims of the
stress-creativity study. They had an appropriate "Cover study" which
acts as an ideology justifying their unusual behavior, roles to play
and rules that gave them permission to hurt another person. And since
it was a group setting, any one subject could decide not to shock as
long as any of the other three shocked on cue, the stress signal was
delivered and the experiment continued, so there was no need to
directly confront the authority figure if you wanted out. No subject
took that option, they only shocked their victims less.

DEHUMANIZATION

My colleague Albert Bandura, and his students, continued this line
of research by extending the basic paradigm here to study the minimal
conditions necessary to create dehumanization. What they manipulated
was only the Actors' perception of their victims, no authority
pressures, no induced anonymity. A group of college students expected
to help train another group of students from a nearby college by
collectively shocking them when they erred on the task. Their shock
box had 10 levels of intensity that they could deliver on any one of
ten trials.

Just as the study was about to begin, the subjects overhead the
assistant tell the experimenter one of three phrases:

Neutral: The subjects from the other school are here.

Humanized: The subjects from the other school are here, they seem
nice.

Dehumanized: The subjects from the other school are here, they
seem like animals.

Mind you, they never saw those other students, or heard anything
directly from them, it is only this label that they have to go on in
imaging what they are like.

[Slide 13: Bandura Dehumanization data]

On trial one, the manipulation failed to have a differential
effect on their aggression, and had the researchers ended the study
there, we would conclude that dehumanizing labels have no behavioral
impact, but as the study wore on, it had a major impact. The boys who
imagined their victims as animals, progressively elevated their shock
levels over each trial after the first, significantly more than the
Neutral Control. Humanizing labels helped to reduce the aggression
significantly below the level of the Neutral Control.

When the subjects were interviewed subsequently about why they
behaved as they did, what the researchers found was that the
experimental condition enabled them to become "Morally Disengaged" to
activate a set of psychological mechanisms that minimized the evil of
their deeds, while justifying it in a variety of ways. So a one word
label can create a stereotype of the victim, of the enemy, that also
lowers the height of that Line between GOOD and EVIL and enables more
good people to cross over and become perpetrators.

[Slide 14: Summary Table of Strategies and Tactics to Get Good
People to do Evil

This table summarizes some of the strategies and tactics derived
from Bandura's research and my own to grease that line and facilitate
that transformation. It specifies the conditions required to
minimize, or suspend the usual cognitive controls that make us act in
pro-social ways, such as conscience, empathy, morality, liability,
responsibility, and others.

External Validity

Before I turn to illustrating what my Stanford Prison Experiment
tells us about the topic of our concern today, it is incumbent upon
me to dispel some of your obvious ruminations about the external
validity of these contrived laboratory studies. Do they have real
world analogues? Do they help us understand parallels of evil in
every day life, or are they merely fascinating and morbid
demonstrations of what psychologists can get good people to do under
the power of experimental demands?

JIM JONES AND THE MASS SUICIDE/MURDERS IN
JONESTOWN

[Slides 15, 16 Jim Jones and PT suicides]

Here is one apparent parallel to Milgram's demonstration, a
powerful authority figure is able to get a large group of people do
the truly unimaginable, to kill their own children and parents, and
then to commit suicide, of if they resisted doing so, to have their
friends kill them. Twenty years ago, U.S. citizens, most from the Bay
Area and Los Angeles, members of a religious- socialist cult, Peoples
Temple, left San Francisco to set up a Utopian agricultural program
in the jungles of Guyana. 913 of them never returned because they
blindly obeyed the ultimate authority of their leader and took their
lives and the lives of family members and friends.

The real world analogues to my deindividuation research was
conducted by a Harvard anthropologist, John Watson, who tested the
implications of my deindividuation theory by hypothesizing that
nations, societies, that changed their appearance before going to war
would be more brutal to their victims, more likely to torture,
mutilate, kill their victims than would societies that did not change
their appearance.

[Slide 17 . Appearances Can Kill, data of 2 X 2 table]

You can see that the researcher found 23 societies (in the Human
Area files) with evidence of whether they did or did not change their
appearance before a battle, and how they treated their victims. The
results are remarkable clear: 80 percent of those nations that
changed their appearance to deindividuate themselves before going to
war committed atrocities on the victims. Of 13 nations that killed,
tortured and mutilated their victims, 92 percent had previously
changed their appearance. So cultural wisdom tells us that one way to
nudge good young men and boys across that LINE into their new
identity as PERPETRATORS is to first disguise them and give them new
masks behind which to hide their evil deeds.

[Slides 18,19# Group of ordinary citizens in the south out on
a Saturday night stroll, and the lynching of three Black men]

One aspect of Bandura's dehumanizing principle is seen in the
following pair of slides, no disguises, no one insisting that they
kill, or even watch the murders of three young men by Lynching,
because they are perceived as less than human, as "Niggers," and that
dehumanizing stereotype enables the machinery of morality to be
disengaged for that time in that place. In a sense lynching and
burning alive Black men in the U.S. usually based on fears of their
sexual conquest of white women, was a form of genocide that took the
lives of untold thousands of these men.

STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

What happens when we aggregate many of these processes that
contribute to the making of Perpetrators: dehumanize victims,
deindividuate potential perpetrators, put them in a new strange,
anonymous environment, and give the perpetrators total power and
render the victims powerless? The answer is: the Stanford Prison
Experiment which contains further lessons in the transformation of
good people into evil perpetrators. Let's review how it bent that
LINE to make some very good young men act very bad.

[Video of TV special 60 Minutes, on the Stanford Prison
Experiment, 12 min.]

It is especially important to hear how the worst of our guards
justified his evil as wanting to see how far he could torment them
before they stood up for the dignity, and rebelled against the
brutality of the guards. They did not, and thus they deserved what
they got. And supposed they did rebel? Would that have pleased him,
and then would he say he was glad to see they had spunk and dignity,
and so would no longer torment them? I doubt it, they lose no matter
what they do. Also consider the God role that he has taken on for
himself.

So what have we learned so far about that Line Between GOOD and
EVIL? Alexander Solzenitsyn offers an insight into where it can be
found.

[OH from Solzhenitsyn]

The line between Good and Evil lies in the center of every human
heart... not in some abstract moral, celestial space, but right here
in each of our individual and collective beings.

When we move up from the lessons of social psychology to the
broader stage on which human collective violence occurs throughout
the world, more principles and processes are required at a meta
level, sociological, historical, and political, which I can not
elaborate at this time.

Perversion of Perfection

We also need to recognize that many of the qualities of human
nature that account for much of our perfection -- like our sense of
self worth, remarkable memory, achievement needs, cognitive capacity
for categorizing and simplifying the complexity of our world,
affiliative needs, and striving for control, can each be perverted by
excess to contribute its portion to the creation and maintenance of
Genocide.

Pride, as with the Angel Luficer, goeth before the fall, but until
it does, can reek havoc on the world through it insistence on mating
with the sense of Superiority and breeding Prejudice. Memory is also
the storehouse of revenge for past losses and trespassing, as we see
in Kosovo today where the memory of the Turkish conquest on July 23,
1357 is as fresh as it was then in the minds of the Serbs.
Affiliation and categorizing ability combine to form tight-knit US
families that exclude and refuse to recognize the humanity of THEM,
the alien others, that we marginalize. Needs for achievement easily
slip into blind ambition and desires for conquest, while the valuable
striving for control gets twisted into needs to dominate others in
social dominance hierarchies or Fascist, Totalitarian regimes.

Self-Reinforcing Nature of
Aggression

I failed to mention that in my Deindividuation research and
Bandura's Dehumanization research, that aggression, once it got past
initial inhibitions, rapidly escalated and increased over time and
trials, as it seemed to become self-reinforcing, violence became its
own reward. We do not want to recognize the pleasure many people take
in participating in violent acts, whether directly or vicariously, as
in spectators at boxing or wrestling matches, The Roman Circuses, men
in mass rape, police in riots, and soldiers in massacres. It is not
alien to human nature but a shard of its non-reflective surface. For
an account of a modern orgy of sustained cruelty I refer you to Iris
Change account of the Rape of Nanking in 1937.

[OH- Rape of Nanking quote by Iris Chang, 1997]

VIOLENCE OF WAR

[Slide 20 War Images]

We have seen how social psychologists have isolated variables that
can contribute to the creation of Perpetrators, but how do Leaders of
Nations do it? How do national policies and agencies do it?

[Slides 21, 22: school children and Nazi rally]

How do they transform these idealistic, innocent children into
Nazi killers? From those who love into those who hate other people
enough to want them all to cease to exist, to exterminate them, to
eliminate them and their very memory from the face of the earth
forever?

It takes a bit longer than the typical social psychological
experiment, but it is nevertheless a social, national experiment in
how human nature can be perverted, transformed into something Evil
for the ends of dictators, politicians, and businessmen.

Briefly, it involves agents and agencies of Socialization,
Propaganda, and Education.

1. Socialization means that parents and adult caretakers shape the
values and ideas of the next generation, it is the basic means of
civilizing children, of transmitting the lessons of the past to the
current generation, of modeling what the culture says is the right
way to behave in order to be a good person. But what happens when
parents become agents of the State whose agenda includes learning to
hate select others, and in doing so provide compelling reasons and
examples for their children to believe in and emulate? That is one
powerful way for ruling elites to spread their ideals and political
agendas across generations to create a youth that will fight and die
for their cause, with the support of their parents, as with the
Hitler Jungen, or currently in Rwanda and other national conflicts
where children are dying for ideals they do not understand, but
include Genocide of their "Enemy."

2. Propaganda was promoted by Machiavelli as a means for Princes
to control masses and spread fear to opponents and adversaries, but
was perfected into an art by Hitler and his team of experts. They
knew an important lesson in the conquest of nations and of the minds
of their own citizens:

* Create an image of their own might as so invincible that it
instilled fear in other nations.

* Create an image of hated members of what they declared were an
inferior race, The Jews, that dehumanized them and encouraged their
extermination as vermin on German soil.

* Central to Genocide is the psychological and sociological
construction of the concept of THE ENEMY, an abstraction into which
the propagandist can embed all the fears and loathing of the
citizenry, all their primal anxieties about survival and well
being.

[Slide 23 cover of Faces of the Enemy by Sam Keen]

Every nation that goes to war must first construct the Face of The
Enemy for its soldiers to want to kill and its citizens to want to
work and sacrifice to prevent its takeover of their land, home, way
of life, woman and children, and even their god.

The last brief video segment I will show, begins with a former
Vietnam Vet who killed many Vietcong, and who states the basic
proposition about soldiers, their weapon and their enemy. It
continues to show how we created images of the Japs in WW11, and how
the Nazis created images of Jews as enemies of the state.

[Video segment of Faces of the Enemy]

We saw in Bandura's research the power of a dehumanizing label,
now see how labeling neighbors as your Enemy can transform peaceful
peasants into Perpetrators of Evil in this recent account of a
Rwandan housewife. Juliana Mukankwaya, mother of six children,
slaughtered her neighbor's children by beating them to death. Why?
Because they had been told by local government officials of the Hutu
tribe and soldiers that her neighbors were their Enemies because they
were Tutsis. That label alone turned long-time friends into instant
adversaries who had to be exterminated, fathers butchered with
machetes, mothers raped and killed, children bludgeoned to death.
[OH:Associated Press report Rwanda killers express no regret,
5/16/96]

3. Education:

All nations educate children to learn information that the state
believes is vital for them to know. What happens when that
educational process becomes distorted so that biases and self-serving
values prevail and knowledge of the truth is suppressed? It happens
to some extent in most countries when they fail to include the
history of their atrocities, or defeats in history texts. Beside
these omissions, education is compromised when teachers and text
writers are subjugated to powerful national forces that instruct them
to teach hate and lies and falsehoods to children as if they were
merely facts about the Enemies of the State.

This was most apparent in the texts that every German child had to
read during the Nazi era, as shown to me by Professor John Steiner.
Some texts were designed to teach children how to write and
understand Nordic Script by copying stories in them, while others
purported to teach geography lessons of people of the world, much as
all of us had in our elementary schools, but with one major
exception, the treatment of the Jews.

The penmanship texts that children dutifully copied told stories
of the inferior, ugly dirty Jew contrasted with the handsome, noble
Aryan. The geography texts continued this lesson by showing Jews as
insects on the back of the Devil, and in a series of vignettes
depicted the horrible Jew in stereotyped scenes, as the lecherous
villain, the filthy butcher, the heartless landlord, the thieving
doctor, the rich banker, and more.

At the end of the text, the students were greeted with scenes of
what were the desired consequences the Germans should do to these
terrible people: kick them out your school, and expel them from your
country. It was an obviously reasonable solution to the problems the
Jews were creating for Germany. And it was then but a further step up
on the shock box to press the XXX button labeled THE FINAL
SOLUTION.

[SLIDES 24-31, SERIES OF SLIDES OF GERMAN TEXTS ENDING WITH A
SCENE FROM THE MASS BURIALS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS]

Conclusion

I want to conclude by having us consider two quotes about the
nature of education since that is our business in the University.

It is imperative that we each make a personal commitment never
again to allow Education to be perverted into a tool for prejudice,
an instrument for demeaning human nature, or an intellectual weapon
for justifying the Evils of inhumane treatment of our brothers and
sisters of any race, religion, ethnicity, or political persuasion.
Education must be our salvation, not our damnation.

[OH, quote from Ginott about the educated people who
contributed to the Holocaust and from Ovid about education humanizes
character and not allowing it to be mean.]

Post Script

That was my intended conclusion to my presentation, but I must add
a postscript that brings my message up to date, and keeps it from not
getting lost in the distant realm of Nazi Germany in another time and
place.

The time is now, the place is here, the potential Enemy is US, our
potential Evil Perpetrator is a very rich, very influential, educated
man who will be running for the U. S. Congress this year.

DAVID DUKE is that man, and he has the power to mobilize
forces of ignorance, prejudice, and fear of many people in our
country on the political right and hate groups internationally. He
has just published a book that lays out his plan for an Aryan
revolution by good Christian men " to preserve the Aryan way of life
in a country he says is already filled with genetically less
intelligent, crime-prone black people and supremacist Jews who
control both Hollywood and the news media."(SF Examiner, 3/7/99, p.
A-10). His book focuses on four categories of enemies: black people,
homosexuals, women, and most prominently Jews, whom he holds
responsible for starting an "ethnic war." [OH: section of news
report on David Duke]

I end on this rather frightening note to make you students aware
that we are not dealing with ancient history, with abstract
psychological principles, or stories about bad things done to other
people in other times. The threat of Genocide is ever present, it is
carried in the minds and influential power of untold numbers of
people like David Duke in the United States and countries around the
globe. With cyberspace networks they can reach millions with their
messages of hate on their web pages and so extend the domain of their
evil intentions in ways we are only beginning to understand.

We must not make them our Enemies in the abstract, but monitor
their ideas and actions in the concrete, and do all in our power to
oppose their distorted values by promoting human understanding,
compassion, and commitments that foster peace at home and abroad.

Recall the UNESCO Charter declares:

SINCE WARS BEGIN IN THE MINDS OF MEN, IT IS THE MINDS OF MEN THAT
WE MUST ERECT THE RAMPARTS OF PEACE.

Thus, the first step in preventing Genocide begins by promoting
peace, love, and understanding in Your Minds and in mine. It is our
first line of defense against Evil, and it is the source of strength
we all need to resist the ever- present, pervasive, powerful forces
in the world that would lure us across that Seductive Line to descend
into the realm of the next generation of evil perpetrators.